Norma McCorvey, ‘Roe’ in Roe v. Wade, Is Dead at 69

Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the United States, reshaping the nation’s social and political landscapes and inflaming one of the most divisive controversies of the past half-century, died on Saturday in Katy, Tex. She was 69.

Her death, at an assisted-living home, was confirmed by Joshua Prager, a New York journalist who is writing a book about the Roe v. Wade decision and had interviewed her extensively. He said the cause was heart failure.

Since the ruling, perhaps 50 million legal abortions have been performed in the United States, although later court decisions and new state and federal laws have imposed restrictions, and abortions have declined with the wide use of contraceptives. Theological, ethical and legal debates about abortion continue in religious circles, governing bodies and political campaigns, and they have influenced elections, legislation and the lives of ordinary people through films, books, periodicals, the internet and other forums.

At the heart of it all, Ms. McCorvey — known as Jane Roe in the court papers — became an almost mythological figure to millions of Americans, more a symbol of what they believed in than who she was: a young Dallas woman lifted by chance into a national spotlight she never sought and tried for years to avoid, then pulled by the forces of politics to one side of the abortion conflict, then by religion to the other.

Her early life had been a Dickensian nightmare. By her own account, she was the unwanted child of a broken home, a ninth-grade dropout who was raped repeatedly by a relative, and a homeless runaway and thief consigned to reform school. She was married at 16, divorced and left pregnant three times by different men. She had bouts of suicidal depression, she said.

Ms. McCorvey gave up her children at birth and was a cleaning woman, waitress and carnival worker. Bisexual but primarily lesbian, she sought refuge from poverty and dead-end jobs in alcohol and drugs.

She was 22 and pregnant when she joined the abortion rights struggle, claiming later that she had not really understood what it was all about. When she emerged from anonymity a decade later, strangers shrieked “baby killer” and spat at her. There were death threats. One night, shotgun blasts shattered the windows of her home.

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Ms. McCorvey with the Rev. Robert L. Schenck of National Clergy Council, left, and the Rev. Phillip Benham of Operation Rescue in Washington in 1996 before the annual march protesting the Roe v. Wade decision.CreditCameron Craig/Associated Press

But she attended rallies and protest marches in support of abortion rights, worked in women’s clinics, spoke to crowds, wrote two autobiographies and was the subject of a documentary and an avalanche of newspaper and magazine articles. She became a national celebrity of sorts.

She also switched sides, from abortion rights advocate to anti-abortion campaigner. She underwent two religious conversions, as a born-again Christian and as a Roman Catholic, and became in her last decades a staunch foe of abortion, vowing to undo Roe v. Wade, testifying in Congress and bitterly attacking Barack Obama when he ran for president and then re-election.

She was never the idealized Jane Roe crusader many Americans visualized. Some observers said she became a pawn used by both sides in the maelstrom of the abortion wars as her public views shifted from one side to the other. In her first book, “I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice” (1994, with Andy Meisler), she offered what was perhaps her own most objective self-assessment.

“I wasn’t the wrong person to become Jane Roe,” she said. “I wasn’t the right person to become Jane Roe. I was just the person who became Jane Roe, of Roe v. Wade. And my life story, warts and all, was a little piece of history.”

Plucked from obscurity in 1970 by Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two young Dallas lawyers who wanted to challenge Texas laws that prohibited abortions except to save a mother’s life, Ms. McCorvey, five months pregnant with her third child, signed an affidavit she claimed she did not read. She just wanted a quick abortion and had no inkling that the case would become a cause célèbre.

Four months later, she gave birth to a daughter and surrendered her for adoption. (Her second child had also been given up for adoption, and her first was being raised by her mother.) She had little contact with her lawyers, never went to court or was asked to testify, and was uninvolved in proceedings that took three years to reach the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 22, 1973, the court ruled 7-2 in Roe v. Wade (Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney, was the defendant in the class-action suit) that privacy rights under the due process and equal rights clauses of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion in a pregnancy’s first trimester “free of interference by the state,” in the words of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the opinion.

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Norma McCorvey in 1998.CreditEric Gay/Associated Press

The majority rejected the view, pressed by opponents of liberalized abortion, that a fetus becomes a “person” upon conception and is thus entitled to the due process and equal protection guarantees.

“The word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn,” Justice Blackmun wrote, although states may acquire “at some point in time” of a pregnancy an interest in the “potential human life” that the fetus represents, to permit regulation. It is that interest, the court said, that permits states to prohibit abortion after the fetus has developed the capacity to survive.

The state’s “compelling interest” in protecting the fetus increased progressively in the second and third trimesters, the decision said. But it and a companion ruling in a Georgia case on the same day nullified abortion laws in 46 states and effectively legalized the procedure across the United States.

Ms. McCorvey learned of the decision in a newspaper. As jubilant women’s and civil liberties groups hailed it as a milestone and foes denounced it as a travesty, Ms. McCorvey stayed on the sidelines, out of touch with her lawyers, who had preserved her anonymity throughout the case. She remained largely unknown for nearly a decade, living in Dallas with her partner, Connie Gonzalez.

In the 1980s, emerging from her cocoon, she counseled patients at a women’s clinic in Dallas, joined abortion rights rallies and began talking to the news media. She made headlines in 1987 when she told the columnist Carl T. Rowan that she had lied when she told reporters in 1970 that her pregnancy had been the result of a gang rape. She said she had thought that the lie would help her get an abortion. Her lawyers did not mention the allegation, and it played no part in the lawsuit.

But it was a bombshell in the abortion debate as Ms. McCorvey became an emotional touchstone. To anti-abortion groups, she was an agent of murder in the womb and a liar who made up a rape story to get an abortion. To abortion rights proponents, she stood for all pregnant women harmed by restrictive laws.

In 1989, NBC explored the case in a television movie, “Roe v. Wade,” starring Holly Hunter, who won an Emmy in the role of Jane Roe. Critics called the film powerful and moving, despite a strained effort to balance views on abortion.

Ms. McCorvey also joined a Washington abortion rights rally that included 300,000 people, appearing on a speakers’ platform with Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Cybill Shepherd and Glenn Close. “I looked out at all those people, men and women, and so many people brought their children, and they were all there because of me and I started to cry,” Ms. McCorvey told The New York Times.

For anyone taken in by the myth of Jane Roe as a courageous feminist who had fought for abortion rights in the Supreme Court, her 1994 autobiography was a dose of reality. She confessed a bystander’s role in Roe v. Wade.

“Because of her ignorance and her lack of self-respect, Norma McCorvey has been more at the mercy of circumstances than many women,” Susan Cheever wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

Ms. McCorvey’s life turned sharply again in 1995. She was working in a Dallas women’s clinic, A Choice for Women, when the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue provocatively opened an office next door. “She couldn’t stand us, she hated us,” the Rev. Phillip Benham, an Evangelical minister and national director of Operation Rescue, told CNN.

But he and Ms. McCorvey met across protest lines and started talking about themselves, Christianity and abortion. She attended his church and within months was baptized by Mr. Benham as a born-again Christian.

Ms. McCorvey disowned her past and began speaking for her newly adopted cause. She blamed abortion rights advocates for violence at abortion clinics.

“I personally think it’s the pro-abortion people who are doing this to collect on their insurance, so they can go out and build bigger and better killing centers,” she told CNN in 1997.

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Anti-abortion protesters outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 22, the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion in the United States.CreditMark Wilson/Reuters

Her second autobiography, “Won by Love” (1997, with Gary Thomas), and a 1998 documentary, “Roe vs. Roe: Baptism by Fire,” detailed her conversion. In 1998, she underwent another conversion, to Roman Catholicism, after talks with the Rev. Frank Pavone, the anti-abortion crusader and director of Priests for Life.

Father Pavone, in a statement, called Ms. McCorvey a friend for more than 20 years. “She was victimized and exploited by abortion ideologues when she was a young woman but she came to be genuinely sorry that a decision named for her has led to the deaths of more than 58 million children. Norma’s conversion to Christianity, then to Catholicism, was sincere and I was honored to be part of that journey.”

Ms. McCorvey, in testimony for a Senate subcommittee in 1998, made her reversal explicit: “I am dedicated,” she said, “to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name.”

She was born Norma Leah Nelson in Simmesport, La., on Sept. 22, 1947, to Olin and Mildred Nelson. Her father was a television repairman, who left the family, and Norma and a brother, James, were raised by their mother, who was an alcoholic, in Texas.

By her own account, Norma stole money from a gas station at age 10, ran away and was sent to a reform school. Later, she was sent to live with a relative, who raped her for weeks, she said. At 16, she married Elwood McCorvey, known as Woody, a steelworker who she said beat her. She returned pregnant to live with her mother, gave birth to a daughter, Melissa, and was divorced.

With drug and alcohol problems, she left her baby with her mother and took a trip. When she returned, she was arrested by the police for abandoning the child. Later, at her mother’s behest, she signed documents that she said she had not read. They were adoption papers, and her mother took legal custody. She gave birth to another child and gave the baby up for adoption in 1967. She became pregnant a third time in 1969.

After trying unsuccessfully to obtain an illegal abortion, she was sent by a lawyer to Ms. Weddington and Ms. Coffee, who began Roe v. Wade.

Active in anti-abortion demonstrations, she was arrested in 2009 at a Senate confirmation hearing for Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court justice. She also campaigned against Mr. Obama. “Do not vote for Barack Obama,” Ms. McCorvey said in a 2012 Florida television advertisement. “He murders babies.”

In 2016, “Roe,” a play by Lisa Loomer, featuring Ms. McCorvey and Ms. Weddington as protagonists, opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The playwright told The Times: “Sarah Weddington, when she approaches the subject of Roe v. Wade, it’s about the law. It’s about choice. It’s about doing something to impact the lives of all women. For Norma McCorvey, Roe is about her. It’s utterly personal.”

Correction:Feb. 22, 2017

An obituary in some copies on Sunday about Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the United States, misattributed a passage about abortion. It was Justice Byron White, who dissented in a companion ruling, Doe v. Bolton — not Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade — who said: “At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are nevertheless unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons — convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc. The common claim before us is that for any one of such reasons, or for no reason at all, and without asserting or claiming any threat to life or health, any woman is entitled to an abortion at her request if she is able to find a medical adviser willing to undertake the procedure. The Court for the most part sustains this position: during the period prior to the time the fetus becomes viable, the Constitution of the United States values the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than life or potential life of the fetus.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Norma McCorvey, 69, ‘Roe’ Who Symbolized Abortion Divide, Is Dead. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe